I created Ovate as a space for authentic, grounded, compassionate support through life’s threshold moments. The moments that change us most, birth, postpartum, grief, reinvention, identity shifts, loss, healing, overwhelm, and becoming, are not meant to be navigated alone. Yet so many people move through these transitions without the care, community, and steady support they truly deserve.

I am an internationally Certified Birth Doula through Childbirth International and am currently completing my Childbirth Educator certification. While I no longer maintain all current certifications, I formerly held certifications in breastfeeding support, pregnancy and postpartum fitness, and integrative nutrition and wellness. I have also spent over two decades self-educating in holistic wellness, herbalism, embodiment, nervous system regulation, spirituality, somatics, and community-centered care.

My work is shaped not only by education and advocacy, but by lived experience. I have given birth three times in three very different ways: a high-intervention induction with vacuum assistance and epidural, a midwifery-model unmedicated water birth in a hospital, and a planned home birth that emergency transferred to the hospital and culminated in delivering on an operating room table while being prepped for cesarean surgery. I have breastfed my children for a combined total of six years. These experiences deepened my belief that people deserve informed, compassionate support no matter how their stories unfold.

I am a California native, though I’ve lived many places throughout the country, and I am grateful to now have firm roots here in Folsom, where I spent many of my formative years. Community care has always been central to who I am, both personally and professionally. Over the years, I have served on nonprofit boards, including as a founding board member for an LGBTQ+ Pride center, ran two U.S. Navy Family Readiness Groups supporting military families through deployment and reintegration, and organized advocacy and community events including serving as the Virginia Beach area organizer for Improving Birth in 2014. As the wife of a Navy veteran, I have spent years supporting families through transition, stress, isolation, and change, and I am comfortable working with people from many different backgrounds, belief systems, identities, and family structures, including neurodivergent individuals, LGBTQ+ clients, those navigating religious trauma, survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault, and polyamorous or otherwise nontraditional relationships and families.

Before and alongside this work, my background also included people and project leadership, graphic design, hospitality, and culinary arts: experiences that deeply shaped my understanding of beauty, nourishment, creativity, and care. I believe food, art, storytelling, ritual, and creativity can all be powerful tools for healing and reconnection.

I do not claim to have all the answers or to have life perfectly figured out. What I do bring is deep care, intuition, lived experience, curiosity, grounded presence, and a lifelong calling to tend to others through seasons of transition. I come from a long line of healers, teachers, spiritual seekers, and strong-willed women who believed care could be practical, intuitive, communal, and sacred all at once. Long before I knew what shape this work would take, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always the same: “I just want to help people.”

My approach is collaborative, trauma-informed, inclusive, and deeply client-led. I believe in bodily autonomy, informed choice, consent, nervous system awareness, and support that honors the complexity of real life. I am not here to rescue or “fix” anyone. I am here to offer grounded presence, practical care, compassionate witnessing, and support that helps people reconnect with themselves and their own capacity.

Outside of this work, you can usually find me tending my garden, playing “will it sourdough?” in my kitchen, collecting too many hobbies, or finding whimsy in the ordinary. My husband Charlie is my partner in all things, and our fiercely individual, creative, and courageous kids are life’s greatest gifts to nurture and guide.

You do not need to be less messy, less sensitive, less overwhelmed, or more “put together” to deserve support. You are welcome here as you are. I’ve got your back.